A Twenty Year Truck Driver - I Will Tell You Why America's "Shipping Crisis" Will Not End

[Klaralven]

...

Let’s start with understanding some things about ports. Outside of dedicated port trucking companies, most trucking companies won’t touch shipping containers. There is a reason for that.

Think of going to the port as going to WalMart on Black Friday, but imagine only ONE cashier for thousands of customers. Think about the lines. Except at a port, there are at least THREE lines to get a container in or out. The first line is the ‘in’ gate, where hundreds of trucks daily have to pass through 5–10 available gates. The second line is waiting to pick up your container. The third line is for waiting to get out. For each of these lines the wait time is a minimum of an hour, and I’ve waited up to 8 hours in the first line just to get into the port. Some ports are worse than others, but excessive wait times are not uncommon. It’s a rare day when a driver gets in and out in under two hours. By ‘rare day’, I mean maybe a handful of times a year. Ports don’t even begin to have enough workers to keep the ports fluid, and it doesn’t matter where you are, coastal or inland port, union or non-union port, it’s the same everywhere.

Furthermore, I’m fortunate enough to be a Teamster — a union driver — an employee paid by the hour. Most port drivers are ‘independent contractors’, leased onto a carrier who is paying them by the load. Whether their load takes two hours, fourteen hours, or three days to complete, they get paid the same, and they have to pay 90% of their truck operating expenses (the carrier might pay the other 10%, but usually less.) The rates paid to non-union drivers for shipping container transport are usually extremely low. In a majority of cases, these drivers don’t come close to my union wages. They pay for all their own repairs and fuel, and all truck related expenses. I honestly don’t understand how many of them can even afford to show up for work. There’s no guarantee of ANY wage (not even minimum wage), and in many cases, these drivers make far below minimum wage. In some cases they work 70 hour weeks and still end up owing money to their carrier.

https://medium.com/@ryan79z28/im-a-twenty-year-truck-driver-i-will-tell-you-why-america-s-shipping-crisis-will-not-end-bbe0ebac6a91

[lindysalsagal]

1. Union breaking, just like postal workers and teachers.

They want to turn the u.s. into India, with no regulations on anything.

[Celerity]

2. the Chinese authoritarian state capitalism model is another possibility, to a degree

minus the faux communism trappings

[Kid Berwyn]

11. The model since the first king.

Slaves a-building pyramids for the pharaoh.

[Celerity]

12. Khufu (Cheops in Greek) was a well known union-hater, lolol

[Kid Berwyn]

14. Organize! Organize! Organize!

“Management has no divine rights. Management has only functions, which it performs well or poorly. The only prerogatives which management has lost turned out to be usurpations of power and privilege to which no group of men have exclusive right in a democratic nation.” — Walter Reuther, 1948



“There is no power in the world that can stop the forward march of free men and women when they are joined in the solidarity of human brotherhood.” — Walter Reuther, 1970

[denbot]

3. The other side of that coin is at the shipping and receiving points stateside.

Every dock seems undermanned, and even major union docks are so undermanned that 24/7 facilities are closing without notice on 2nd & 3rd, and on weekends even day shifts. Not only does this cause further delays, it also hurts driver retention. Waiting an extra 12-24 or even more hours pisses drivers off. We and most companies pay detention (Pay for waiting, most drivers are paid by mile), and overlay (After a certain amount of hour overlay is a per diem amount), but this can't match what a driver can make with fast efficient loading/unloading turn around times.

Long haul is a dangerous, sometimes brutal, difficult, and too often seemingly thankless job where you're in the middle between the shipper, receiver, customer, Department of Transportation, and often by the driver's perception the company they work for is at odds with them, interfering with the driver's ability to make the most possible money per load.

Drivers are leaving in, well, droves with no change in sight. This will likely get even worst in the coming months, and probably continue at least a couple/few more years..

[ripcord]

4. Hauling containers is a job that screws drivers

I have been getting all kinds of offer to work at the ports and I won't for two reasons, one I enjoy being retired, two I'm too old to be screwed anymore.

[roamer65]

5. One solution.

We need to make more shit here in the US.

[Raine]

6. EXACTLY 👍 we wouldn't be in this mess if things were made here! nt

[uponit7771]

8. +1

[Buckeyeblue]

10. This should be the major issue for the next 2 years

Not only did big corporations sell out their workers when manufacturing was moved off-shore, they put in place a major dependency that potentially harms the entire country.

We need to open new, modern factories.

[love_katz]

7. Agreed with all points.

Most of our social system and infrastructure is a failure of design. The greed heads who are sucking the life out of everything are short sighted idiots who are only interested in their own profits. Human kind has had most of our most significant advances through cooperation instead of competition, and our most renewable resources are our ingenuity and our ability to care for each other and this beautiful planet that we live on. The current supply chain is fragile, overly susceptible to disruption and is not sustainable in the long run. On further consideration, it is not sustainable in the short-term either. Right now, most of us older people are tired of working in systems that are hostile and designed to grind us into dust, Younger people have not been trained to step in to these jobs, and given the crummy pay, the lack of benefits and the miserable working conditions, they can't be blamed for not stampeding into this line of work. The plutocrats and their dysfunctional business model are reaping what they have sown for years. The one gift of the pandemic is that the actual value of service jobs can be clearly seen, and the folly of treating workers as disposable is starkly exposed.

[Klaralven]

9. It is a clear counter example to basic free market theory

Clearly a large number of interacting businesses, each trying to optimize their own profit, do not result in an optimal overall economic system.

[edhopper]

13. Fucking Reagan!

[love_katz]

15. Exactly,.

We have had over 41 years of Reaganomics. We can see how that turned out.